Adventures, Travel, Japan

August 27, 2011August 17, 2013

Delivery woes

Image by Satorare via Flickr

As an expat when you arrive in Japan, one thing that you need to take care of is that the electricity in Japan is 100 volts at 50Hz, I dont really know what that means but if your electronic device does not accept this then you probably need a voltage converter or an adaptor. This meant that most of my electronics which I had bought outside of Japan would not work. hence, when I decided to relocate to Japan I sold off / gave away most of my stuff and decided to buy new electronics, house hold appliances and furniture.

I didnt sell the laptop though. It works fine except that it gets really heated and shuts down after like 2 hrs. Some of the expats face the same problem. My workaround this is that I use a laptop fan hence preventing the laptop to get overheated and shutting down.

Enough about the laptop, if you decide to buy everything new here in Japan, in many a case you will need to due to the voltage difference, you need to keep the following in mind

Most of the products are for local consumption hence the brochure etc is all in Japanese, additional languages are not available. Mobile phones can be set to English or your language of choice but the manuals will still be in Japanese only. Initially I tried to search for the manuals on the internet but if you try using model no. as search word its kind of impossible to get what you are looking for. The next solution is search for a e copy of the product and use google translate to help you figure out stuff.

Next is the issue of the time taken to deliver your goods, here are a few examples: